Videos and graphics are keys to the mind and appeal of the viewers in the 21st century. To top it up, it is quite a cake walk, and this decade has seen the increasing use of this technology in every sphere ranging from corporate businesses to even educational institutions. Videos are considered as the most effective medium to spread your message and impart knowledge along with consumer reviews.

Videos often become renowned overnight and before you know it, they become the talk of the town with a wide number of viewers. While these instantly viral videos can trigger a great number of viewers, what is imperative for corporations or businesses is to focus on sustained and long term results through video content. Video is considered to be a very effective customer service tool & referral tool as well.

While other forms of presentation such as written documents or oral presentations have limited means, video enables you to give a face, persona, thought, and voice to your company allowing it to reach out to the customer quite effectively.

5. Include the customers in your videos. The best way to get new customers is by keeping the regular ones satisfied.

6. Promote each of your strategic referral partners.

Bonus tactic

You can organize a get together or a gathering of all your reputed clients or regular customers and hire a professional video production company to record their reviews, feedbacks, and success stories at the event. This will not only enhance your social standing, but it will also give you great content as well.

Getting started

Although the quality of professional video content is superior, it is not imperative to hire professionals to fulfill general online video content requirements.

Camera – It is advisable to use portable video cameras like the FlipHD or even point and shoot cameras from reputed companies such as Canon. When you want to record feedbacks or interviews, you could use a camera with an external microphone jack, which can be attached to the interviewee making it professional and convenient.

Editing – Laptops, PCs & Macs have inbuilt free-of-cost video editing software – iMovie for the Mac & MovieMaker for the PC. Also, for higher quality results, you could use Adobe Premiere or Apple’s Final Cut software, which has superior outcome.

The heavy lifting – Often streaming, downloading or hosting videos from the internet turn out to be a Herculean task, but websites such as Blip.tv, Viddler & YouTube have nipped this in the bud. All you need to do is pick the best service, put up your video, and the service will convert, stream, host it and also impart a code for the player to be incorporated on your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search engines are the encyclopedias and bibles of the 21st century. So, no matter the service you pick, ensure to incorporate essential keywords, tags, and description for your content.

Promotion – More often than not, you want to increase the viewers and hits, so this calls for advertising and promotions. One of the most effective video promotion tools is a service known as TubeMogul. Following an uploaded video, it distributes your video to various video hosting sites and gives you a detailed review and analytics on the feedback and outcome.

So, adapt to the need of the decade and use video content for your company or business. This technology is superior and so fascinating that you might even want to create your very own live or recorded web TV show on the new breed of video services like Ustream.

This article was written by Joe Forte, co-owner of D-Mak Productions LLC. Clients choose D-Mak Productions for top quality video production in Phoenix. D-Mak Productions specializes in commercial, event, music, fashion and corporate video production and is known for its creative style of video production, fast turn-around time and easy to work with manner.

There has been big demand for more hands on lead generation than we have provided in the past. While we provide great lead generation software and lead generation training, we have tried to empower people to do it themselves with the Buzzoodle system instead of getting involved with the companies in a consulting manner.

However, many people really do not want to learn how to build lead generation sites. Instead, they just want someone to build them for them, write for them and produce high quality, targeted leads.

Recently we started offering just such a service. For those people that want to focus on their business and not get involved in the “how” of lead generation, you can now visit our main site, Buzzoodle.com. Buzzoodle is a lead generation company that offers several options. You can work with them on developing your custom lead generation website or you can lease a lead generation website from them and not worry about the details of writing, back linking, SEO, mobile marketing, social media and more.

Inbound marketing techniques for lead generation have been shown to have a drastically lower cost per lead compared to outbound marketing techniques such as direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows.

The upside of Inbound marketing is the lower cost and the quality of the lead. The downside is that it does take time to develop and strengthen over time and also does not work equally well for all products and services. If you have a product or service that people do web searches for or that they research before buying, then Inbound is going to work better for you. However, a good side effect of any Inbound Lead Generation program that Buzzoodle does is that the effort produces great backlinks to your main company website and that will increase search ranking over time in a very ethical and positive way. So lead generation and SEO go hand in hand in the Buzzoodle services.

I am not a social media junkie. My book came out about creating buzz online before FaceBook was open to the public and before Twitter existed. I have stayed involved but have not made social media a top priority.

However, Google Plus may be different. I have been in it 48 hours now and I really enjoy Google Plus. It is cleaner and simpler than FaceBook, although it lacks a few things I would like moved over from FaceBook. And unlike twitter, Google plus is not as easy to spam which means it actually has somewhat interesting information in it.

I find it nice to be starting over and building up a great list of interesting people from scratch. Of course I am adding the people from other networks to my Google Plus account too, but I am also looking to meet new people and use it much more collaboratively than the other things from the past. I’d had high hopes for Google Wave to be a great tool for social collaboration, and that did not work out. I think Google Plus has a lot of promise in this area.

Also, lead generation with Google plus will be achievable because people are actually paying attention and interacting more on Google Plus than they do in the other networks. It seems to combine the best of Twitter and FaceBook and does some new management things that make it a really great tool.

I suggest you check out my profile on Google plus and add me to a circle so we can stay in touch. I am really going to make that my Google Plus about higher quality content than the other networks which I mostly automate.

Whether you are growing a major business or just getting an Internet business going from the couch, WordPress is the weapon of choice to generate valuable, targeted leads for you.

The beauty of this is that it levels the playing field. WordPress itself is Opensource and fr.ee. Hosting on a host like Bluehost is less than $6 per month. Writing is often easier for the solopreneur because the major corporations have such strict compliance issues.

The blogging software itself performs better in search engines than anything you can buy if you spend a few minutes configuring some plugins and settings. It generates leads through ranking higher in search than other types of websites.

What people do not realise is that most blogs do not have many repeat visitors. In fact, more than 75% of a blogs visitors are via search on any given day and they will only visit once and never return.

This means if you do not convert them to a lead, you have lost them.

It also means that they are not reading your posts every day. It is fine if you write on the same topic regularly, because no one will read the back articles anyway.

WordPress also has some built in features you will never see, but none the less they are working for you. RSS and Pinging are letting other sites know what your site is doing and it lets search engines know that you are ready to have them come and index the site again – pumping up that traffic.

Tagging is another powerful feature. When you tag with keywords you have identified as high value, you will rank higher for those keywords.

And finally, if you integrate a good call to action or lead capture strategy, a decent number of people are going to give you their information and become a lead for you.

You can use WordPress to develop your personal brand, sell affiliate products, build your list or generate leads for your CRM. It works great with any of these. If you want to get videos and tools to help you do this better joing Buzzoodle.com and jump start your success with WordPress.

A recent client of Buzzoodle.com was getting such good traffic to their WordPress business blog that they wanted to delete it.

Why? Well watch this video and see how their logic went. As a side note, this is what happens when a programmer is asked why the main website is not performing well – they blame the other site on stealing. Not cool.

I meet people every day that say their niche is small and mid sized businesses. In fact, the same could be said for me as my lead generation software is ideal for the small and mid sized businesses. But this niche is a mistake, because a business is not someone that you build a relationship with, and in today’s online marketing world, relationship is everything.

Let me give you an example of how targeting people is better than targeting organizations, at least for the online marketing group.

If I target small business, I might want to sell the small business owner on a particular service or product that will help their business grow. The problem is that the small business owner is often frustrated that things have not gone as well as they had hoped when they started the job and they are jumping from thing to thing trying to figure out what works best to simplify their business.

On the other hand, if I target the frustrated small business owner as a person, I might offer them something entirely different. They know the ups and downs of business and they are now ready to build multiple revenue streams. They invest in their own personal development and would welcome information on how to expand what they are involved in.

This is a much stronger connection because I am talking to the person. I am tapping into their hopes, dreams and frustrations. I am helping them get closer to the ideal image they have of themselves.

They might take the knowledge or product and put it to work in their small business, but they also may launch something else to create multiple streams of revenue. And they are less likely to give up on the product or service because it becomes part of their identity, not just a tactic they are using to see if it works.

So if you are one of the countless people targeting the “niche” of small business, rethink how you can connect to people and grow your business.

It is a fairly detailed summary of seven of the most common online lead generation strategies.

Also, it has a FaceBook discussion at the bottom so that we can learn from each other about what works when it comes to online lead generation.

If you have a moment, visit the page and let me know what you think. Also, please like the page as that helps us build the discussion and attract more people that are interested in online lead generation.

Great secret to email marketing – the more times you send valuable stuff to your email list the more money you make. Duh. But I think we all hold back and that means we are not making money with email marketing as well as we could. Video below is how I learned about this.